Does anyone have any ideas which would lift the profile of our sport (because we need it)
I have scratched my head for years and can not put my finger on it.
We have one of the fastest, hardest and exiting sports in the world, but we are near the bottom of the ladder in the popularity stakes.
There are football teams in the 3rd division with crowds bigger than some Super League teams.
I know we are a football dominated country but surely there is a big enough sporting population in this country to attract new supporters to our game.
When will the powers that be stand up to the fact that we are a minority sport and tackle the problem.
Rugby Union did it almost 20 years ago and it seems to have worked for them. Be it to start that they realised they had to move from being amature to become professional.
One big for instance for me is that a game like darts has been taken from playing in pub tap rooms to being prime time tv on sky sports and attracting crowds of up to 10,000 for which half of them cant even see the stage.
Not to mention something like the WWE wrestling (enough said)

One of the main reasons i think we struggle is that when most amature players retire from the game they drift away from our sport because a lot of amature teams dont have there own clubhouses so inevitably they have to socialise in pubs after a game which can change from year to year leaving players with no where to keep there intrest in the game when they hang there boots up.

Go and have a mince pie mate.

Win an ashes series, win a World Cup in Australia, get 2 games a week on live free to air, have every club getting crowds of 15,000.

Straight forward really!

The only and easiest way is for all the fans to interest our own mates and bring extra people to games we should stop complaining about the RFL, always looking for a cheap ticket and do something easy and simple ourselves!

I don't think this will really do that much, we just need to all settle down and get stuck into developing the game more, stop worrying about union, stop blaming national media ignorance, and just get on with putting the money we have into creating the best sport in the world. Its clear that certain things tried over the last 20 years haven't worked, we should learn and get a grip of putting the clubs we have in the game first and not thinking about what might be

IF IF IF IF we win xx or expand into xx or get xx TV channel to broadcast us.

Put all our effort into getting, supporters, clubs, players, sponsors, administrators all singing from the same hymm sheet and get on with it steady as she goes for the next 10 years.

Then we will see the fruits of the sport move forward inthe public psyché. Until we are all in balance, we will never amount to anything we haven't already, including winning the world cup.

Sanity

Correct, there is no magic wand, no one thing that will miraculously project the sport to a bright future, however club owners and administrators need to start running their clubs as they have previously run their businesses , set apart the playing side from the business side

As previously stated there is no and fast fix for the game but there are a number of things that IMHO can help. These however will not catapult the game to mass audiences overnight and therefore:-

1. Plan for the long-haul and stop looking for quick-fix-headline-grabbing stories.
2. Expansion should take place but in its PROPER meaning. Expansion from the centre (ie the M62 heartland) outwards. The best way to inflate a balloon is little by little and try a little more. Mass inflation of the same balloon in one go can often cause it to burst.
3. Strong base. RL is a pyramid. Yes, SL is at the top but just think of the size of the base required to support it. Gettinbg kids into the game earlier helps, but with H&S rules in school, funding requirements, dare I say the competition of football, its keeping the kids interested that the main target
4. Money. Yep, this is down here in my list of opinions (maybe even lower) because until you have 1-3 planned it doesnt matter how much money (and what type) you chuck at a problem, it doesnt solve it. As for "what type of money", single mass injections dont help the overall position. You need long term investment. Which is beter for the game £100m investment in one year or £50m for two or £25m for 3.
5. Coverage. I'm not a fan of SKY and the influence it now has over the game but I do recognise the publicity (and following on from 4, the money) it brought to the game. I am one of the MANY households that dont have SKY TV and hence my Tv rugby is limited to the "wonderful" SL show or cup games. Herein lies the problem. The BBC will NEVER properly commit to our game in the sense of striking a proper deal for coverage. How about we let the commercial channels strike a deal? Initially coverage to start in the NW/NE for say 1 game per week (yep, even if that game is Salford v Widnes!!!!). To start with Im not bothered about getting on the telly in the SW, south coast, south wales. Lets get people who live close to the grounds going first.
6. Profile. Here, we are not just talking about profile of the game but, of the game through the players. These guys own there living from the public. Lets encourage them to get out into the community and give stuff back (something already done by successful clubs). It will be interest to see what happens when Gareth Thomas appears on the ice-skating show in the New Year. Whats the betting that he will be described as "former Wales RU international" without a mention of his RL career. The Stobart deal last year could have worked for raising the profile of the game except IMHO it was poorly thought out. Who actually say one of these "SL emblazoned trucks". (Yep, I say a couple and I live near 3 Stobart depots). and who actually notices whats on the side of a truck as you go past it at 4am on the motorway. Using this approach on the "smaller" vehicles used mainly for local drop offs in the RL heartland first !!!!!!!
7. Retain the experience. Find ways of retaining all that rugby experience within the game. very often we hear that a rugby players career is short (hence the big money) but why should it be? Yes, playing competative matches might not last until players are 40 something but that doesnt mean their rugby careers stop, they just change
8. Management. Only left this until the bottom of the list because it needs to be tackled (no pun intended) in a manner that addresses the above. Very often people get appointed due to their experience but very often people with wide experience are those who have either moved on due to lack of interest in an area or who have been made to move on. RL needs to be a business, and as stated previously needs to be run by business minded people. Dare I say that Warrington has been a model for many things with the game and how its run is another. The business is run by business men, who appoint the right people to the right roles with the knowledge that "if this thing dont work, we are screwed" rather than, "ah well, I can always get a job in tennis/athletics/PR etc ".

In other words......its simple really !!!!!

"De-northernise" the game.

Get the middle class involved

Drive away some of the idiots

Rebrand the sport.

Simple answer, internationals. Lets compare our domestic game to RU & cricket for example. RU's domestic game i don't think is as popular as SL. Crickets domestic game is watched by a man and his dog except maybe for T20s. But they get extensively more media coverage.

That's because their sports put the national team as the priority. All their resources go into developing the national team. Look at the autumn internationals. 4 international tests in the middle of the domestic season. Yet every single nation was at full strength. In RL we only had two tests and both teams had to field a weakened team in the second one because SL coaches won't happy. And we wonder why we don't get the media coverage? From a papers point of view, a lot more people read about the England national team than a domestic result in any sport!

Spot on.

Unfortunatly until you have enough viable competitive ' interested ' nations playing the game you will never use it to grow the sport

The International part of RL is the weakest part of it, you need to build from your strongest part, that is SL and the semi pro leagues ( although overal they are financially in a mess ) , trying to use the International part is trying a short cut, it will never work

Rebrand? , show me the record of that being a success in RL?

Idiots? , so drive away who exactly? , people who attend matches? , that'll help

De Northernise? , explain that one?

Middle class? , like London have done?

Sorry WQ, more holes than a lump of swiss cheese

Indeed, dirty scummy flat capped vermin.
.......who started the game of rugby league off in the first place. Complete b'stards, all of them. What what.

A 50,000 (min) seater stadium owned by the RFL which RL can call home, in the same way that Twickers, The Millenium and Murrayfield are for their respective unions, to generate the kinds of income required to drive sustained growth nationally and internationally of our game.

Rebrand? , show me the record of that being a success in RL?

Hasn't Super league and what Sky has brought (and everything associated with that) been a successful re brand of the game, for example. Winter/summer, Fri and Sat night prime time Sport TV, Decent grounds .............

Idiots? , so drive away who exactly? , people who attend matches? , that'll help

If you cant see them when you go to matches then you go to different games to me. There are far to many watching(and ruining the game). There are a few that keep plenty from going. Fights, Drunks, Homophobic chants...go on compare it to football.

De Northernise? , explain that one?

Expand the game so its national-Does it not speak for itself. Do you really believe the game can grow whilst it is based in 3 areas of the UK at top level- Warrington and its surrounding 10 miles, Leeds and its surrounding 10 miles and a city in East Yorks

Middle class? , like London have done?

London hasnt-London attracts toothless goons. It makes me wonder where they find them.- The middle class watch RU. Until the game moves away from its northern working class roots it will go nowhere. Difficult to swallow but fact. Northern towns cannot prop a top level sport up

Sorry WQ, more holes than a lump of swiss cheese- which holes

The product on the field is key.

We have two 'showpiece' events in European RL and both get very respectable crowds and coverage levels. Much of that is down to the fact that the quality of the product and occasion is very high. Elsewhere however, that's not the case. We have too many poor quality clubs and teams, we have too many one-sided game and too many times when teams can win whilst still in "third gear". Without that element of "any given Sunday", like you find in the NRL, in US sports and, to an extent, most levels of football, we're going to struggle to get anything other than the hard-core coming to games.

And that's what we need because if this forum is any indication, your 'hard-core' fan is one that is constantly moaning about how much stuff costs, how the league is a waste of time, how play-off matches (which aren't a waste of time) should be free, why any initiative will 'never work' and how much of a 'joke' the game / RFL is. Until the game can supplement (or dare I say it, replace) that sort of hard-core fan with a more, shall we say, desirable clientèle, it will continue to struggle. There are a lot of affluent people living in cities like Leeds and Manchester and their leisure dollar is valuable. With the right product, the game can attract it's share of this market and thrive.

Northern cities could. The problem is that northern towns are just that - towns. Youve got top flight clubs in places of less than 100k people. So few of the northern cities over 100k have pro rugby, let alone an affinity for the game.

Spot on.

So in your opinion we should get rid of the teams who play in northern towns,? if we do that we might as well start from scratch, because theres only one northern City what has done anything in terms of wining things and thats Leeds, all the rest have gone into administration, or been propped up by the ruling body, some fans seem to go over board with there debating of how the sport should go.
Like it or not Rugby League its Northern sport, thats where it's roots are, every time the game has tried to move out of the area it has failed badly, so were do we go next, London fans are a bit sp, and without wealthy benefactor would have gone the way of the dodo some years ago,
the game has tried to spread its root in to Wales, and it's been plain to see how well the game has gone down in that country, so were next, every place we have tried to take the game to has failed, the only new club to be successful is Catalan but RL is not new there it's been played there for donkeys years,
So expansion has not worked in RL whilst i have been watching it, and it has stayed a northern game were us poor working class folk live.
So if you want the game to be a success in your well off middle class areas, the first thing your supporters need to do is put your hands into your middle class pockets and help the club out by supporting the club through the turn stiles, instead of letting a Northerner do the job for you

Paid for how? With how many games in it per year? 3 or 4 at a max and that includes taking the Cup Final away from Wembley and the Grand Final away from Old Trafford.

So SL has been a successful re brand, OK, so are you suggesting is we rebrand it again? Which other part of the sport would you re brand? , and what as?

Apart from the odd bit of ' handbags ' and verbal abuse RL is relatively tame, unless maybe you just get the pi55 heads on the lash in London at the Stoop, but as you say still much better than mass policing as you see in footy

So where's the problem, and how do you suggest you stop these ' fans ' attending?

Wrong.
England RU hosted Fiji, South Africa, Australia and then paid the All Blacks 2 million quid to pop in this autumn at Twickenham. Cheapest tickets were 40 notes.....average ticket costs is 70.

328,000 punters, blanket coverage in most papers and news sites, highlights on the news bulletins and just shy of 20,000,000 in the bank.

Fiji were dipatched with ease, but the other teams ranked 1,2 and 3 in the world were a different affair entirely.

England RL hosted and thrashed Wales and France this autumn in front of tiny crowds who paid 12 quid whilst the teams ranked 1 and 2 sat at home.... do I need to say any more?

The last RLWC, played in a country where RL is MASSIVE attracted less fans than 4 England RU international friendlies.....



Until there are potentially 8 strong RL nations with another 8 behind them getting stronger then the international game will always suffer by comparison like the one above. And whilst the ANZACS masturb8 over SoO, a Billion dollar TV deal and refuse to play ball, then that's never going to happen.

the crowds for the recent Autumn series would have looked pittyfull in a 50k seater stadium.....jesus, even the wembley doubleheader only got 44k and that was at a tenner a pop......I suggest you stop watching field of dreams.